Sleep (10 page)

The beach was littered with shells.

“Can we stop?” Marcus said. “Can we collect some?”

He went along collecting shells in his sand bucket while David and Julia followed behind. David reached a hand out for Julia’s and felt grateful when she didn’t resist him.

“What do you think?” he said. “Could you see living here? No more department meetings, no more theme birthday parties.”

“You’d get bored in a week. You need to be on the circuit.”

“I could do the circuit right here. Take the golf cart out for a spin every morning.”

“Right.” But she was laughing. “And leave me doing the laundry by the river with the other
chicas
.”

Julia spotted a speck of some sort out at sea, then another, and they tried to make out whether they were dolphins or whales. They couldn’t have spent more than a minute or two looking out, but when they turned back to the beach Marcus was nowhere in sight.

David’s stomach dropped.

“Jesus, David, where is he? Marcus!”

His mind went at once to the dangers, the water on one side, the bush on the other. Who knew what the currents were here, maybe dangerous rip tides. And then all the abduction stories you heard, what better location than this if they’d been followed?

Julia was already out in the water, thrashing through the shoals looking for who knew what. The beach fell away steeply here and in a matter of steps she was nearly up to her waist.

“For God’s sake, where could he be? Wouldn’t we have heard him if he’d gone in the water?”

David remembered the public service ads they used to run of the sound of a child drowning: perfect silence. If a current had taken him, they were lost.

“My God, David, what should we do?”

“Keep searching the water! I’ll search the shore!”

The shingle of beach stretched no more than half a dozen metres before coming up against brush. He tried to make out footprints, but the beach here was mostly shale.

It was possible they had been targeted right from the moment they’d stepped off the ferry, that someone had waited for just such a chance. He knew Julia would never recover if something had happened to him, would be ruined, they both would.

“Marcus!”

Then he saw it, a narrow path through the dense growth and, faintly, what looked like footprints. Already he was doing the calculations in his head, how much money they could raise in a hurry, who they would go to.

Something moved in the thicket of shadow ahead of him.

Marcus was crouched in a clump of ferns like an animal evading capture. A million emotions collided in David.

“For the love of Christ, Marcus! Didn’t you hear us calling you? What are you doing here?”

He seemed afraid to get up.

“What were you thinking? Answer me! Why were you hiding?”

He was shouting now, had pulled the boy up by his arm and dragged him out to the open.

“Don’t ever try something stupid like that again!”

Julia was running toward them.

“What are you doing? You’re hurting him!”

“He was just hiding there, for fuck’s sake! We’re going out of our heads and he’s just hiding there!”

“Let go of him, you’re hurting him! Did you ask him why he was hiding? Did you do that?”

All he could see was his anger, like a burning wall he had to pass through.

“Ask him what, for Christ’s sake? I could see for myself he’d done it on purpose! We’re shouting like idiots and he’s hiding there the whole time like it’s some kind of game!”

“But why would he do that? Why?”

“You tell me! Because I don’t have a fucking clue!”

“That’s right, you don’t have a clue! Whose fault is that? Whose fault?”

The day was ruined after that; the entire trip was. The family had atomized along familiar lines, a clean break. David didn’t even bother trying to find out what Julia might have managed to glean from the boy about the incident. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want the excuses, the lies. Didn’t want to have to think how differently things might have gone if he had simply taken the boy in his arms.

“Davie, you with us? We better move on that house tour if you want to have time for the visit.”

He realizes he has blanked out. Microsleeps, Becker calls these episodes, a sudden drop in his brainwaves from alpha to theta for seconds or microseconds, long enough to lose a conversational thread or crash a car.

“I think I’m going to give the restaurant a miss.”

“Not the restaurant. I meant Dad. Ma, did you tell him at least?”

“It’s not for me to tell him. It’s for him to know.”

“Come on, Ma. I wouldn’t have remembered myself if you hadn’t reminded me.”

“Don’t lie for your brother’s sake. Every year you’ve gone with me.”

David’s brain hurts. More than anything, he wants the day to be over.

“Could somebody please tell me what the fuck we’re talking about?”

“You see?” his mother says.

“It’s no big deal, Davie. We were planning to stop by the cemetery, that’s all. To pay our respects. It’s twenty years today.”

Twenty years
. The number staggers him. Sometimes he still feels the man at his back as if it were yesterday.

Twenty years from now, maybe this is what David will be to his own son, just this darkness, this tumour.

“Can we get going, at least? Who knows what the traffic will be getting Marcus home.”

He must have had his reasons. Some impulse he couldn’t shake. Or maybe he had turned to see his parents walking hand in hand and it had hurt him in a way he couldn’t have named, the danger and the hope of it.

Danny puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Just a quick tour of the house, then we’ll go. Who knows when we’ll get you out here again.”

The house goes on forever, with more square footage than their whole city block had back in their old west-end neighbourhood. In the basement there is a second kitchen, a second family room, a wine cellar; an entertainment centre with a cinema-sized projection screen. The floor, of polished concrete, is lined with radiant heat.

“All geothermal,” Danny says. “Thought I’d do my bit for the environment. They had to drill halfway to China to put the pipes in but it practically puts us off the grid.”

“I guess you’ll be set when it ends, then.”

“What’s that exactly, Davie? When what ends?”

“Civilization as we know it.”

Danny doesn’t miss a beat.

“I figure that ended a long time ago, brother. Strictly the law of the jungle out there. You should know more than anyone.”

David might almost be pleased by all of this if it didn’t feel like something set against him. Right from childhood his relationship with Danny has always felt like a zero-sum game, just a certain portion allotted to them that they must forever fight to get their share of. Even when Danny got picked on in school there was always a part of David that was relieved, as if whatever Danny got, he himself was spared.

Danny takes him outside and leads him to what looks like the facade of an entirely separate residence, jutting out in a big bay from the side of the house with its own double-doored entrance and trellised courtyard. The courtyard feels utterly private and self-contained, with no sightline to the front entrance or the back patio.

“You could live here and never know there was a whole other house attached,” Danny says. “That was the idea.”

From his bated air David senses they have come to the real object of the tour. Inside, the facade’s bay has been mirrored to form a big diamond-shaped space, with a kitchen to one side and a sitting and dining area angled around it. It takes David a few seconds to figure out what is so eerie about the place: it is like a miniature of the house their father built when he moved the family out here, specially designed to fit its odd-shaped ravine lot.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll bite. Is this where you put the au pair? The mistress?”

“Come on, David. It’s for Mom.”

“You’ve got to be kidding! She’d have to be dead before she moved out here.”

Danny shifts. “I guess she didn’t say anything, then.”

“What, do you think she’s going to move up here to look after your kids? She loves it downtown! I don’t know if you actually got her to agree to this, but if she did she’s just stringing you along.”

“She’s already sold the place, Davie. It closes in a couple of months.”

David feels the hum start at the back of his neck.

“I get it now. It’s about the restaurant, isn’t it? You figured you’d get the condo money out of her so Nelda can have her little amusement.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, David.”

He turns to see that their mother has come in behind them.

“Don’t I?” Just wanting to lash out now, to do damage. “What did your condo fetch? A million? One five?”

“Don’t start this, David. You won’t like where it ends.”

“At the truth? Is that what you mean? You both made it sound like you couldn’t rub two cents together when Dad died but now look at you, with your restaurant and your monster house. I didn’t see it then, how you closed me out.”

“Closed
you
out?” his mother says. “You didn’t ask about the money back then, did you? You didn’t want to know. You had your scholarship or whatever, that was all that mattered. You had your condo. Why do you think I sold the house up here, really? Do you think I cared about going to museums or the theatre? Do you think I cared about shopping?”

“Ma,” Danny says. “Just stop. We don’t want to do this.”

“Tell me, David. Why do you think?”

He has made his scene after all. And so will get what he deserves.

“Because we needed the money, David, that’s why. We needed the money. Who paid for your condo, did you ever think of that? Did you think it was free, just because your father built it? You knew all the problems he’d had with that building, all the buybacks we’d had to do, but you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to know.”

She has done it again. Now this is the version of things he will have to live with, that will become the truth.

“It’s like you’ve been holding this over me just so you could throw it in my face! Why didn’t you just say something back then, for Christ’s sake? I would have signed the thing over in a heartbeat for all I fucking cared!”

“You think I wouldn’t have asked? It was only for Danny’s sake that I didn’t. He fought for you then, if you’re looking for the truth.”

Danny won’t look at him.

“That was years, ago, Ma. Why hash it out now? We just did what Dad wanted. We just did what was right.”

He didn’t want to know. All these years he has gone along thinking that he was the one who had always had the upper hand.

History has shown that whenever twins stand in line for succession, one of them has to die.

“As far as I’m concerned, Davie,” Danny says, “this conversation never happened. Let’s not let it wreck the whole day.”

They leave the kids behind with Nelda and drive to the cemetery in Danny’s SUV. The vehicle reeks of luxury, leather seats, drop-down video, in-dash GPS. David sits in back, the first time he can remember being in the back seat of a car since he was a teen.

“You still driving that fancy import?” Danny says.

The fancy import that he had had to return to the dealer when the lease expired because he couldn’t afford the buyout.

“Strictly subcompact these days. Thinking about the environment.”

“Yeah, right.”

David feels sleep coming on as soon as the car is in motion. It was how he used to put Marcus to sleep when he had colic, driving the valley parkway for hours at a stretch. Something about the movement and white noise, people said, the containment of the car, like being back in the womb. Maybe it is the same for David, the same sense of regression.

He slips a hand into his pocket and feels by shape for a tab of ten-mig immediate-release.

Danny’s eye goes to the rear-view.

“You okay back there?”

“Just wondering when the movie starts.”

“Don’t joke. Half the time Nelda and Ma sit in the back when we go out so they can catch up on their soaps or whatever. Makes me feel like the frigging chauffeur.”

They ride past houses built like Palladian villas and Disney castles, one after another, with huge fountains out front or mile-long driveways with enough interlocking brick to pave the Appian Way. Like Rome before the fall, when everything got sloppy and big, the roadways out of the city lined with the monuments of all the middlemen who’d got rich bilking the provinces. Back when their father moved them out here, this whole zone was still farmland—that was probably what drew him here, the prospect of looking out from his back garden to open country like some aging Cincinnatus. By the time he died, the cornfields beyond their ravine had already given way to the road and sewer works of another development.

This is always the first image of his father that comes to David, of him tending his garden, though it wasn’t something he himself ever showed an interest in. That was Danny’s job, to show an interest. David’s was to resist at all costs, to pile up grievances. Over stupid things, he sees now, things that hardly mattered, and yet at the time it felt like his whole being depended on this unreasoned defiance. At one point he even started imagining to himself that his father was some sort of imposter who had wormed his way among them, taking his cue from the story his mother used to tell of how they met, when she was working for an uncle’s construction company and he came looking for a job.

“I had to fake everything for him, all his papers. He didn’t have so much as a library card.”

David used to do furtive searches of his father’s bedroom drawers, his closet, his desk, looking for he didn’t know what. Some clue, some proof he didn’t belong to them. There were occasional handwritten letters from Italy but he could never decipher them; there were photographs, mostly of job sites but also older ones of people he didn’t know, their surfaces cracked, their edges oddly serrated. It took David years of looking at maps before he found one that showed the town his father’s passport listed as his birthplace, up in the lake district. Later he would figure out it wasn’t far from Salò, the town where the Germans had set up Mussolini’s puppet republic after the Italians deposed him. For years, right into adulthood, the idea persisted in David’s mind that his father had had some connection to it, on the basis of nothing, really, given that his father would have been all of seventeen by the war’s end.